System Builder’s Guide: June R25,000 to R30,000

25 June 2016

By Wesley "CataclysmZA" Fick

Hello, boys and girls, welcome to the last episode of the System Builders Guide for June 2016. The two builds we’re getting into today are both high-performance and high-end, and typically spending this much money gets you a system that lasts you at least five years before you’re forced to look at an upgrade. Both builds today are ready for the next generation of VR games and headset technology, and both are also fully DirectX 12 compliant.

That doesn’t sound like much, I know, and the final climax of seeing the new hardware launch, after all these months of being told that both these things are important, just doesn’t feel that good. We’ll need new games, and better VR experiences, to get the tongues wagging again. Despite this, I’m quite ready to get over the DirectX 11 era, and you should be too. Follow me!

Kicking off today’s builds is the R25,000 budget. In recent years, this has typically been a build that focused on per-thread performance. But, there was a notable catch with it – there was a Xeon processor, not a regular Core part, at the center. That came along with the typical trappings of the Xeon brand, like a slower memory controller, no integrated graphics and no overclocking, but it was super-cheap compared to the standard Intel part.

Well, that kind of went away this year. Intel moved the Skylake Xeon support off to a different chipset, and now you’d have to buy a board with the C232 or C230 chipsets to run them. The regular Core processors are also now cheaper than their comparable Xeon siblings, and I question this decision. The server chips are slower. They lack particular hardware features (though they allow access to others). They can’t even be overclocked through the base clock. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I think it’s a poor move on Intel’s part, at least locally. Even the motherboards aren’t that much cheaper.

But anyway, I digress. This build ups the core count from the previous one, but will be slower in some instances because it cannot be overclocked. It still boasts four cores and eight threads though, which is nothing to feel bad about, as well as a great cooler and a decent, good-looking motherboard. It’s really not a bad deal, and it’ll handle your encoding and game streaming with software like OBS just fine. The memory count and speed is also quite a nice update from the last machine I had at this price point.

Heyyyyyy there, Geforce GTX 1070. While stocks of NVIDIA’s latest mid-range king are a bit low at this moment, every now and then there’s enough to go around. For R8,999, this is a fantastic price. It’s on the level of a Titan X for much less money, and there’s still a sizeable amount of overclocking headroom for extracting extra performance. As you may have seen in my Radeon RX 480 pricing article, sales of the GTX 1070 will greatly disrupt the upper end of the market. Say what you want about Pascal, but this is one damn fine GPU.

Given the low power requirements of these latest GPUs, I’m able to keep the budget in check by not opting for an overpowered PSU. I’d like to have been able to slap in a better one with a Gold rating, and perhaps a single 12v rail, but this Seasonic M12II 620W unit will do just fine. If you ever feel like it, this build also accommodates two GTX 1070s without running into space, heat, or power issues. SLI is even well supported in most games. How often does it happen that things just come together well?

The chassis is my new favourite high-end design, the Phanteks Ethoo Pro. I like understated chassis. There are no RGB LEDs adorning the front, there’s no glossy, fingerprint-friendly bezels to touch. It’s just good design. Finally, there’s a Samsung 750 EVO 500GB drive in there for storage. We don’t need to go much faster than this right now, however attractive those NVME speeds are.

R30,000 budget – You paid how much?

UltraHD 4K with High settings and 4x MSAA, 2560 x 1600 with Ultra details and 4x MSAA using VRR

We’re moving up in the world with an extra R5,000 burning a hole in our pocket. The budget allows a slight bump in CPU specs to the Core i7-6700K. It feels overpriced at over R6300, but it’s what we have to contend with thanks to our exchange rate. I doubt many of the retailers are making much money off the cost price from their suppliers. Cooling it down is the Corsair H100i, a solid water cooling unit with quiet fans (I had the pleasure of using one at rAge Cape Town), and I’ve also bumped up the motherboard to Gigabyte’s ZX170X Gaming 5, mainly for the extra power phases. RAM is still a 16GB DDR4-3000 kit, and I doubt most people will need RAM that’s much faster than this.

NVIDIA takes up the top two spots in this month’s guide thanks to the GTX 1080. This is one really fast card. It finally gives the Radeon R9 295X2 its eviction notice at the top of the leaderboards for 4K benchmarks, and it does so using a fraction of the power draw that the dual-GPU Radeon requires. Being the first card to also use GDDR5X memory also has its perks, as the design is easier for NVIDIA to switch to, and HBM is rather expensive in any case. This Galax version is still a reference design, but with some tweaks, and ships with a better and quieter cooler than the Founder’s Edition reference cooler. Wootware lists this one as being in stock on 30 June, which seems to be around the time that most custom cooler designs are coming on to the market.

Because the GTX 1080 doesn’t have high power requirements, or put out huge amounts of heat, the chassis and PSU recommendations stick. So does the SSD, for a similar reason. If all of these parts were a bit cheaper overall, which would be possible with a slightly better rand to dollar exchange rate of, say, R13 to $1, then I’d be in budget. But, given the level of performance on offer here, I couldn’t refuse the idea of going a bit over. It’s a good system overall, and will surely last you for the next three years before you have to think about upgrading.

Thanks for getting through this week’s guide! Next month I’ll be moving back to the Laptop Buyer’s guide. There’s still a R60,000 build coming your way next week (for funsies), so keep an eye out for that. Have a great weekend!

It really depends on the software and applications you end up using. Render times on a stock Core i7-6700 and Core i5-6600K are more or less the same. The Core i5 could go faster thanks to the unlocked multiplier. Intel made some odd decisions with Skylake because the Core i7-6700 doesn’t have the same base and boost speeds as the K version. Previous generations were like that, offering a decent performance boost over the Core i5 line.

I do think that there’s a benefit to the upgrade, however. Having the extra threads helps with real-time encoding of your games if you’re a streamer, as well as taking care of any background processes that would otherwise slow down a game running on a quad-core.

As time goes on, quad-cores will also become unsuitable for some games owing to the load placed on individual threads running on one core, like a driver thread on one core, physics on another, and so on. I think that even for someone who’s using their PC for gaming, basic photo and video editing, as well as productivity, the extra threads are more of a benefit than higher clock speeds on a quad. Some people see general performance improvements in 64-player maps on Battlefield 4 when playing on a Core i7 or FX eight-core chip rather than a quad.

At some point there’s just not enough room to spread things out on a quad-core chip with a relatively low TDP, and that’s why a Core i7 chip comes recommended. I know that quite a few people, myself included, would like the ability to drop what we’re working on to switch to another desktop on Windows 10 and launch a game to give our brain a rest. But if you still have Chrome open with 30 tabs, a few Word documents, several Edge windows displaying PDFs, GIMP, a Gmail window, Pidgin, and Windows Media Player running all at once, I have to close several things so that it doesn’t affect my game. And I don’t like closing things!

Tank Muller

I’ll be honest, I only understood about 70% of what you just said.

Jan Adriaan Boshoff

Hey guys. Just thinking… Can’t we get a Nag Dream machine collumn going?

Tank Muller

Man, the body parts I’d sell to set myself up with either of these rigs…

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